Broaderband: DreamHack plans to activate 120 Gbps net connection

Networking titans Cisco and Telia are to activate a staggering 120 gigabits per second internet
connection at Sweden's yearly DreamHack expo, and serve it to
20,000 visitors, in an attempt to build the "world's fastest
internet connection".

DreamHack is an annual digital festival and LAN party, held this
year at Elmia Fair in Jönköping, Sweden. Throughout the course of
the event, from 24 to 27 November, participants are encouraged to
hook up and download all manner of content.

The connection runs a distance of about 300km from Stockholm to
Jönköping, and 50 staff members from Cisco, Telia and Dreamhack have spent the last year and a big
stack of cash building the record-breaking infrastructure.

Telia handled the fibreoptic cables, while Cisco deployed two
CRS-3 routers (capable of scaling up to 322Tbps -- fast enough for
all 1.3 billion people in China to conduct a video call
simultaneously, apparently). While the CR router family was in
development, it was apparently known by the codename of HFR, which stood for "Huge
Fucking Router".

The previous DreamHack-record managed to squeeze 20 gigabits per
second down a pipe. The organisers have already smashed that (at
the time of writing, the peak
bandwidth usage has been 23.4Gbps) but this year the organisers
plan to multiply that number by six.

An eye-watering 120Gbps internet connection would theoretically
allow 750,000 people to stream music from Spotify simultaneously,
or allow a person to grab a movie off iTunes in 47 thousandths of a
second. You can follow the progress at DreamHack's data dashboard.

"It's great to be part of building the fastest connection in the
world," said Jonas Malmgren, sales manager at Cisco. "In addition,
we now have the opportunity to test our equipment under extreme
conditions.

"120 gigabits is tremendously fast but data and video traffic on
the internet is growing sharply, as well as the need of broadband.
DreamHack gives us a taste of the future net speeds," Malmgren
said.

As a point of comparison, Ofcom said in March 2011 that the "average UK broadband speed is
6.2Mbps," though speeds up to 100Mbps are available. In South
Korea, the world leader in internet connectivity and speed, 100Mbps
is about average, and experiments
into 1Gbps connections are currently being carried out.